Hacking Language
- 3. Creative Computing: Industrial, Fine, & Popular Digital Art
- 4. Creative Computing & Programming as Inquiry … same thing.
- 5. The Trope Tank http://trope-tank.mit.edu
- 6. Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions? >no You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. >go east You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring. There are some keys on the ground here. There is a shiny brass lamp nearby. There is food here. Adventure Will Crowther & Don Woods, 1976 Exercises in Style Raymond Queneau, 1947 Curveship
- 9. Figures from Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Davies, I. & Shapiro, L. (2005) Colour categories in Himba: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis. Cognitive Psychology, 50, 378-411.
- 13. Piet programs: color as code Hello, World by Thomas Schoch Pi by Richard Mitton The signifier of a circle is itself a circle
Editor's Notes
- #3: @everyword is a Twitter bot I made in 2007 with the intention of Tweeting every word in the English language.
- #4: Across languages, the color space gets neatly divided into different "blobs"—but no two languages do this in exactly the same way. The figure in the upper-right hand corner shows how the space is divided up in English; in the lower left and lower right figures, we see how the space is divided up in Berinmo and Himba. Berinmo is spoken in a number of villages near the Sepik river in Papua New Guinea(1); Himba is a language with over 50,000 speakers, spoken in Namibia(2). 1 http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/berinmo.pdf 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himba_people Source: Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Davies, I. & Shapiro, L. (2005) Colour categories in Himba: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis. Cognitive Psychology, 50, 378-411.
- #5: here's the same visualization from before, but extruded into an additional dimension! so this is another kind of semantic space: we have quantifiable dimensions, and a way to map sequences of words onto those dimensions. this one in particular looks ripe for exploration—like you could send a space probe right through it.